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Breaking down the barriers, one standard at a time

While video is clearly a pervasive form of communication – both in our personal and professional lives, there are still barriers to be addressed before it can become even more inclusive. Jonathan Rosenberg recently addressed some of the challenges to video communication in his blog series, “The Ten Deadly Sins of Mobile Video Calling.”

At Skype we care about quality. Quality can be addressed in a number of ways, and we’re tackling the improvement of quality across many fronts on a constant basis. Today we’re pleased to announce that we’re helping eliminate some of these challenges with the introduction of a new standard interface for communication to H.264 encoding cameras.

An open standard, Skype UVC 1.4 overcomes existing prohibitive proprietary standards and allows silicon vendors to implement video calling on a wide-range of consumer devices, regardless of which partner they choose to work with. Traditionally, encoding and decoding of video often happens on the CPU, but having this processing take place on the camera can improve quality dramatically. This new open solution will become the new de facto standard for video calling and will make it easier for partners to develop encoding cameras that deliver superior video communications through the elimination additional processing by the device running Skype.

We firmly believe that Skype UVC 1.4 is the ideal solution for consumer electronics manufacturers, silicon vendors and embedded video device ODMs as it will provide increased flexibility and freedom to develop cameras for a wider-range of consumer electronics devices as well as access to Skype’s continually growing ecosystem of users.